QUICK HIT: Media.net & the Ad Tech Landscape

Peter Prestipino

Posted on 8.25.2016

Advertising technology solution Media.net has been acquired by a group of Chinese investors for a reported 900 million.

Technology entrepreneur Divyank Turakhia started the company which provides the technology powering contextual ads (similar to Google's AdSense offering) offered by Yahoo! (now owned by Verizon) and Microsoft Bing search engine. The deal comes as merger activity involving ad-tech companies seems to be declining with just 40-some deals of regard during the first half of the year. That’s a roughly fifty percent decline from the same period last year.

Media.net generated $232 million in revenue last year, more than half of which came from mobile visitors, Turakhia said in the official announcement. The U.S. accounts for 90 percent of Media.net’s revenue, but the company is hoping to make a big push into China after the deal, he said.